Coq: Happy to See it as a Geek Toy Daniel, I'm really happy you defined Coq a geek toy. Usually such pieces of software are more seen as academic toys, seeing it promoted as a geeky software is a joy to me. I'm a developer of Matita, a concurrent system of Coq (yet less mature a of today). I'm happy to give some more info about Coq (and hence about Matita, which is based on the same logical foundation of Coq). Coq is not really a programming language (even if the CoqArt book says so, to attract the developer community), it is mainly a proof assistant; i.e. a software in which you give definitions, state theorems and prove them. The added value of the system wrt plain pen and paper is that it grants that you won't be able to produce incorrect proofs (of course you are still free to prove useless theorems ). It is more expressive than predicate calculus, technically it is based on the Calculus of (Co)Inductive Constructions, but the most important differences are that you can give inductive definitions of predicates (or define recursive data structures) and the system will let you play with them freely automatically constructing recursors on these data types. You can even define infinite data structures (using co-induction) mimicking lazy types available in languages as Haskell. Regarding the synergy of Coq with OCaml: yes, you can prove in Coq the correctness of OCaml program, but actually not more than you can do with programs written in other programming languages (see for example Why, Krakatoa, and Caduceus for some practical tools to prove properties about Java and C programs). Yet the synergy with OCaml is even more than that: once you proved properties like the existence of, say, a prime number greater than a given prime number, you can ask Coq to generate for you (using a feature called extraction) an OCaml program which consumes as input a prime number and returns the next one. More generally you can extract programs from (suitable) proofs. Some info on the Debian side: thanks to smimou Coq has been in Debian for a long time now and Why/Krakatoa/Caduceus are coming soon. Happy hacking!

So, one of the reasons I've been a bit uncommunicative the last few weeks is that I've been getting my head around Coq, maybe one of the most fascinating pieces of software I've played with in a long time.

What is Coq? I don't know if I understand it well enough yet to give a complete description (the Coq tome only arrived in the mail on Friday and I have yet to make it past the introduction, what with taxes and so on). Here's my best shot:

Coq is a programming language where you write proofs as functions taking proofs of their preconditions and producing proofs of their results. That is, a proof that "If X is an integer, then X-1 X" becomes a function that accepts a proof of "X is an integer" and produces a proof of "X-1 X".

You can manipulate logical expressions more or less the way you expect. For instance, if you have in your hands a set S of natural numbers and a proof that "forall nonempty sets T of naturals, T has a least element", then you can bang these together to produce the least element of S (or rather, a proof that it exists).

I don't think this describes the theoretical underpinnings of Coq, but it does describe my experience of actually using it to prove stuff.

To get the hang of Coq, I'm working my way through basic automata theory -- regexps are done, but I couldn't work out how to express some finiteness constraints on FSMs without generating a lot of extra typing; hopefully the Coq book will have some hints. Once that's done, I'm actually tempted to try something more ambitious. [snip long digression] We'll see ... watch this space :).

It was a real rush, though, to code up these theorems and watch the computer verify them. What really fascinated me was how close to being a practical tool this is. Coq isn't at all a toy -- without quite getting all the theory yet, my intuition is that it can probably cover anything you can express in the predicate calculus (with sufficient amounts of typing, anyway), and while there are a few shortcomings, it's almost (IMO) at the point where anyone who knows some formal logic and has a little patience can prove interesting stuff. Even more suggestive of possibilities, there's a project (which I sadly haven't had time to look at) that integrates Coq with OCaml, so you can have proofs about your OCaml code verified at compile-time!

I could go on and on ... anyway, this is a really cool tool and I'd encourage any mathematically-minded person to give it a spin. The only sad thing is that I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to explore this stuff in my day job unless/until I go back to school :-(.

Shortcomings of Coq specifically and the whole concept of correctness proofs on programs generally have been moved to a future blog post that may never appear depending on how ambitious I'm feeling this week. Rest assured that I'm aware of (some of) them, I just hit my self-imposed length limit.

[0] the reason being that I could only prove correct the formal underpinnings of the resolver; in practice, a lot of the bugs are in the interface to apt, or in apt itself, and I can hardly prove that code correct.

So now that etch is out, m68k is no longer an officially supported port in the latest version of Debian . However, if you have a look at a DMNY[1], you'll see the following:

ncftp /debian/dists > ls
Debian3.1r6@                           proposed-updates@
Debian4.0r0@                           README
etch/                                  sarge/
etch-m68k/                             sid/
etch-proposed-updates/                 stable@
experimental/                          stable-proposed-updates@
lenny/                                 testing@
lenny-proposed-updates/                testing-proposed-updates@
oldstable@                             unstable@

Note the 4th line of output:

etch-m68k/

Yes, that means there is a way out for users of Debian/m68k. The etch-m68k suite will allow us to update patckages for etch on m68k only, much like the AMD64 folks did on sarge. This is necessary, since etch/m68k is a bit too different from 'regular' etch. Want to help? Head over to debian-68k@lists.debian.org and/or #debian-68k on OFTC. Help is always welcome. [1]Debian Mirror Near You

If I enter "a b" in blogger then it works, but if I want the symbol to be next to some other text (EG for a #include line in C source) then it treats it as a HTML tag. The HTML code for a symbol also doesn't work. This doesn't work regardless of whether I try entering HTML in the HTML editor or entering text in the "Compose" editor. I could deal with this problem if it forced me to strictly use one of the two editors available, but it fails in both!

Do other blog server programs have problems like this? I think that I need to change my blog server just to allow posting C source!

Also do any of the common blog servers allow a file upload? For most of my posts I do all the editing offline, so I'd rather just upload a HTML file instead of pasting the text into the blog editor (and then manually fixing the situations where it's idea of formatting differs from mine). If such an upload mode also supported getting a file via HTTP then that would be convenient too. The option of editing a file on a remote server with vi, exporting it via Apache, and then getting it to the blog server via HTTP would work well for me in some important situations.

Update: It sucks more than I thought. The feed misses the "less than" character between "a" and "b" in the above paragraph. My list of requirements in this regard now includes the ability to use such characters in a feed. Actually I want to go the whole hog and be able to include samples of HTML in my blog entries and have them display correctly in the feed.

Planet Venus as a personal home page Planet Matt is my shiny new home page, based on the Planet Venus feed aggregator. It displays my recent updates from Advogato, LiveJournal, Flickr, and elsewhere. It also provides a single feed for friends who want to subscribe to all of my updates without tracking down a username and feed for each new service. This gives some of the same benefits as ClaimID or Red Hat's MugShot, but it runs at a domain I control, and doesn't depend on any one third-party service. As a bonus, the home page is also my new OpenID URL (using delegation). Right now I'm using a slightly modified version of the "classic_fancy" theme that comes with Planet, plus some simple custom filters. I'm developing a new theme that will be more suited for use as a personal home page, which I plan to contribute back to Planet Venus for others to use. Let me know if you're interested.

A little remembered fact is that the Debian Jr. project had a directory in the subversion repository of the CDD project at Alioth. Aside from Andreas Tille’s experimental conversion of Debian Jr. to use cdd-dev¹, there was nothing else there until today. While I was in the process of populating this directory with the junior-* metapackages and adding an external reference to the live CD config, it seemed to me that it would be better to move the whole thing to our own repository at Alioth, which I promptly did. So now you can check it out:

$ svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr

As well, I registered Debian Jr. at http://cia.vc/ and configured svn so that the CIA bot will report on the #debian-jr channel at irc.debian.org for every commit. And finally, I applied for the creation of a debian-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org list. As soon as the list is created, I will hook it up to the repository so you can subscribe to commit emails.

¹ Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, for various reasons I ended up sticking with the single metapackage per category model Debian Jr. uses to this day. But I have retained this experiment in the repository under svn://svn.debian.org/debianjr/branches/EXP-cdd-dev in case we ever reverse that decision.

Most of the time when I lookup the IP addresses used in FTP and SSH scans, they belong to some network in china. And apparently the last two times when the Asus website was modified (this time exploiting another unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer, with .ani files), they were loading exploit code from certain servers in China. Well, I guess you just cannot trust their regime; if it isn't actively encouraging the hacking activities, it at least completely fails to do something about them (you might recall that China tries to censor much of the Internet, but apparently they aren't able to firewall off hackers going out?). It's hard to tell what their motivations are. I guess it's military interests (i.e. having points of attack in case of a war) combined with industrial espionage. To me this means, that I can't really trust developers from China, and that I better double-check their code. While I don't assume them to be bad guys, you never know what their government might force them to do. Sorry about that.

My main bank is Cahoot. I'm reasonably happy with them - they pay a good rate of interest on a current account which is what drew me to them, but I like the fact I can do basically everything I need in their web interface at any time. However they seem to frequently announce periods of unavailability for card use or simliar. The latest announcement is:

Important update regarding use of your cahoot card: On Wednesday the 11th April between 21:00 and 22:00 there will be no service for cahoot card holders at Abbey, Link, and VISA ATM's. All point of sale transactions will be subject to a limit of 500 during this period. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this essential maintenance.

This isn't the first time they've said I'd been unable to use my card for a certain period. They also seem to do (pre-announced) work on their website that causes it to be unavailable. While none of this has ever caused me a problem (yet), I do find it quite surprising. I never have any such announcements from other banks that I use. Are Cahoot just more honest about when they're doing potentially service affecting work? Or do other banks just have systems that don't result in any downtime during upgrades? Does anyone elses bank do announcements in the same fashion?

As I've posted before, I recently read Lawrence Rosen's Open Source Licensing Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. And I'm sure many of you will recognize the enormous constructive value of early-morning cavilations. Well, today I woke up thinking about strengths and weaknesses in th different Free Software licenses, and I decided to add my grain to the world of license proliferation. So, here goes version 3.14 of the CoPL. I wonder how long will it take before it reaches /usr/share/common-licenses on Debian systems ;-)

		       CONFUSING PUBLIC LICENSE
		       ========================
	This is version 3.14 of the Confusing Public License (referred to from
now on as "CoPL"). Copyright (c) 2007 Transnational
Republic. Additional copies of this license can be purchased at no
cost from any Transnational Republic citizen at any of its recognized
outposts, or freely copied. 
	Any legal claims regarding Original works or any of their Standard
versions licensed under the CoPL Should not abide by and be carried
out according to the current law of the Transnational Republic. The
Original author to pay for any attorney and other legal fees of any
dispute regarding said Original author.
	This license text is designed to protect all the Technology covered
under it under a thick layer of incomprehension. No technical,
professional or social measures might be used to subvert the intent of
this license. This license Must be carefully or professionally
reviewed by a lawyer or attorney, under any jurisdiction. Any serious
attempt to understand this license will immediatly terminate your
rights to keep reading this license. Original works licensed under the CoPL
will not be affected by this provision, you will still have permission
to use them.
	Redistributions of source code Should not retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 
	0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a
   notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
   under the terms of this Confusing Public License. The Original work
   below refers to any such program or work or Standard version.
	1. You desire to license the Technology to a
   large community to facilitate research, innovation and product
   development while maintaining compatibility of such products with
   the Technology as delivered by You
	2. Original author desires to license the Technology from You on
   the terms and conditions specified in this License.
	3. Redistributions in binary form Should not reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
   documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
	4. The names "Joe", "Curly", "Moe" and "The Three Stooges Foundation"
   May be used to endorse or promote products derived from this
   Original work without prior written permission, as they are in no way
   related. 
	5. There is no number 5. Seriously. In all Original works licensed under the
   CoPL, all necessary technical and social steps May be taken not
   to include, in any explicit way, the number 5.
	6. Original author Must make and give away verbatim copies of the
   source form of this Package
   without restriction, provided that Original Author duplicates all of
   the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.
	7. Original author Must apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other
   modifications derived from the Public Domain or from
   the Copyright Holder. A Package modified in such a
   way shall still be considered the Standard Version.
	8. No Standard versions of the Original work Must be protected by this
   license. Original authors Should not choose a different, saner
   licensing model for the distribution of any modifications they
   make. The CoPL should be taken as a retroviral license.
	THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL YOU BE
LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION
OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
				     Definitions
	"You" means the original author of the work covered under the CoPL.
	"Original author" means you.
	"Thou" means God almighty.
	"May" means "Should not, no matter what".
	"Must" means "May".
	"Should not" means "Must".
	"Reasonable copying fee" means nothing.
	"Standard version" means a modified version of the Original work.
				      DISCLAIMER
	The CoPL text, from the words "This is version" and up to and
including this paragraph, is to be taken as a preamble, and will not
be effective under any circumstances. 
	All work licensed under the CoPL should be considered as licensed
under the GNU General Public License version 2 or (at your option) any
later version. It is not the task of this license to point you on
where to get hold of said license.

This morning after having had my car parked in the sun for a couple of hours I poured water on the rear window to cool it (as described in this post). When I did so the mist that rose up from the window spiraled up in a way that was similar to a cyclone (but on a much smaller scale).

Would this have been caused by the steam rising off my car after I poured the water on? Or might the air have been moving in that pattern before and merely have been revealed by the water vapor?

It's a pity I didn't have my camera. My phone-camera doesn't have anything close to the quality needed to make a movie of this (it would be doubtful even with my regular camera).

Since Spring is well underway, I wanted to post a sort of schedule summary of my activities in the following three months. First of all, I have registered and booked the flight for Debconf 7, yay! I can stay with friends of mine that I know from the time I worked in Edinburgh. I want to thank Krzysztof for this offer, it saves a lot of money and it will be nice to catch up. Besides Debconf, there are also several nice parties and events this spring, and of course the completion of my master project.

• 2007-04-19: Finish my Master Project paper
• 2007-05-16: Finish my Master thesis
• 2007-05-17: A State of Trance 300 celebration outdoor
• 2007-06-01: Master Project presentation (date not definite)
• 2007-06-12— 2007-06-26: Attend Debconf7, holiday in Edinburgh
• 2007-07-19: Official graduation date (ceremony postponed till 2007-08-28)
• 2007-07-07: Intuition Summer event!

And after that,... who knows? It probably should involve some work in the summer and maybe an ad-hoc holiday. I’m looking at several options: maybe do a PhD, maybe working for Google or maybe something completely different. More about that later.

Wow!
I got a mail from the YAPC::Europe organizers telling me I won a book for registering early and sending in a submission (as I have previously told you). I was even more surprised to find out I am one out of two lucky winners! So my new book is Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof.
No news yet on whether my talk (Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group) will be accepted... But this kind of incentive does push me towards attending even if I am not accepted - Of course, it depends on the University sending me there. But anyway, I'm a step closer to Vienna. Somebody wants to join over there?
Oh, and by the way: On my previous posting on this topic I linked to my conference proposal URL. Little did I know that this URL is private, accessible only to the Academic Committee and me. Yes, different from what I'm used to... but that's the way it works there.

Russell blogs about his new 22" cheap TFT monitor. You lucky bastard.
I use a 17" Dell LCD monitor at work (sorry, cannot recall the model), and I've been quite pleased with it. Granted, 1280x1024 isn't what I had gotten used to (1400x1050 on my previous laptop and previous work machine), but it does the trick - And for my current laptop, I went for a smaller machine, with a 12" wide-screen 1280x800 monitor. I still find the monitor somewhat small, and the missing 224 pixels _are_ noticeable - but the size is well worth it.
But what I've been playing at work with is changing the monitor orientation - This 17" Dell monitor can be set up vertically (1024x1280), and xrandr will merrily change the orientation. So far, I'm happy with this setup. I still feel there are some video-related quirks, and maybe the pixels are a bit off (i.e. black letters in a white background have a bit of a shadow), maybe it was visible as well in the regular configuration, but not as noticeable. But well, I feel it easier to work with for most of my work cases - For having a full-screen browser, each row is smaller and more rows fit on screen - It's quite pleasant. For doing Web development, having a horizontally split screen (one above of the other) between Emacs and the browser is quite natural. And when I use more than two frames (i.e. for following logfiles or debugging multi-factored breakages on servers ;-) ), well, they are small enough that it's similar to having the ol' regular layout.
I'd still like to get a second video card and monitor. I remember working that way in the job I left four years ago, and it was very comfortable.
BTW, Russell, for your needs I suggest you to try Ion. After all, who really needs to have a root window/background after all? :-)

Do you already know crm114? Taking quotes of the crm114 book:

What is this? Some kind of grep bitten by a radioactive spider?
— apocryphal CRM114 isn’t ugly like PERL. It’s a whole different kind of ugly.
— John Bowker

Want to get a calculator using crm114? No problem:

% cat > calc << EOF
 
  eval (:_dw:) /:@: :*:_dw: :/
  output /:*:_dw: \n/
 
EOF
% crm calc
(42*23)+(11/3.14) # press return and EOF (ctrl-d) at this stage and get the result:
 969.50318

There’s a crm114 book (PDF, 283 pages!) available for free download. Just apt-get crm114, the installed-size is less than 1MB. Thanks Maddi for pointing me to it again, it was on my todolist for ages.

I used to be a hardcore daily bike commuter. (By “hardcore,” I mean I commuted 20-30 miles roundtrip every day in Chicago in January.) Lately, I’ve gotten lazy, especially since I now live about thirty seconds by foot from a train station that takes me to a spot about thirty seconds by foot from my job. Also, since I’m now supporting two people (including my nearly two-year-old daughter), I’m a little more reluctant to get myself killed. I was reminded of the perils of biking in Boston this afternoon when a 22-year old bicyclist was killed by a dump truck in an area where I used to ride daily:

The bicyclist, a 22-year-old man from Halifax, was riding between two lanes of traffic on Huntington Avenue when he was clipped by a taxicab near Northeastern University at about 2:30 p.m., police said. After being clipped by the cab, the bicyclist was run over by a McCauley and Sons Co. dump truck, police said.

When I was a bike commuter, I was fairly cavalier about this sort of incident. I realize it’s still fairly rare and biking may not be any more dangerous than driving. But we still see these events in Boston fairly regularly. I don’t think it can be fixed fully by better driver education/behavior (or better bicyclist education/behavior). There are just too many streets that are poorly designed and naturally hazardous. On a related note, Nat mentioned this nasty run-in during a recent Critical Mass in San Francisco (the article is obviously from the driver’s point of view — there may be another angle on this):

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando’s 11-year-old daughter. They went to Japantown, where they enjoyed shopping and taking in the blooming cherry blossoms. Things took a turn for the worse at about 9 p.m., when the family was leaving Japantown — just as the party of about 3,000 bikers was winding down its monthly red-lights-be-damned ride through the city. Suddenly, Ferrando said, her car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists. Not being from San Francisco, Ferrando thought she might have inadvertently crossed paths with a bicycle race and couldn’t figure out why the police, who she had just passed, hadn’t warned her. Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van. Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides. A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side. “It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,” Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike — shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside. All the while, Ferrando was screaming, “There are children in this car! There are children in this car!” …

Update 4/5/2007: the 22-year-old bicyclist had a myspace page.

At work, I recently encountered #261107 on our distantly Debian-derived server and workstation distros. It really annoyed me because installing the mysql-server package fell over in a screaming heap when it went to create the mysql user. I'd seen a bug filed internally, relating to this particular use case, and initially I thought, based on the output, that it was the MySQL package's pre-install script not quoting the string "MySQL Server", but upon further investigation with strace, it turned out to be adduser's internal call to chfn that was failing, all because of the lack of a controlling terminal. Anyway, a colleague fixed the problem, and pointed me to the abovementioned bug, and this is what strikes me as so strange: the bug has been open for approaching 3 years. I can't reproduce this bug with a stock sarge or etch install, yet I can reproduce it on an Ubuntu Dapper-derived system at will, by calling chfn -f with /dev/null redirected to stdin. If this bug was biting with any sort of regularity, there'd be people rioting, because their adduser calls would be falling over, left, right and centre. Yet it was obviously reproducible for the bug submitter, and I can reproduce it at work. There's more to it than the lack of a controlling terminal. The plot, it be thick. Update Mystery solved. Apparently if you specify terminal restrictions in /etc/security/access.conf (even explicitly restricting it to "ALL"), pam_access gets all bitter and twisted if there's no controlling terminal for the thing being authorized. Wicked.

Totally unoriginal, but I thought it was amusing. I also get some strange search phrases: "My gas meter is making a clicking noise" - then stop using the computer and call your gas company! (In England, the contact number should be on a label on the meter, or in most phone books under "Gas".) "My computer is making loud ticking noise" - that's better. Open the case and listen to the fans and hard disks. One is probably broken. "How many cars are there on the roads today" - too damn many? "How to send an email so that everyone doesn t see the addresses" - put yourself in the To line and everyone else in the Bcc (blind carbon copy). See my email guide for other handy tips. "How do i say in an email that there is an attachment" - How about "There is an attachment"? "Samsung yp-u2 linux" - it works as long as you don't want to upgrade the firmware. More... "How to satellite aiming motor europa" - point it at the sky, not at europa. I'll add more instructions to my satellite page as I rebuild my system. "MJ bad" - at least there are 4 times as many "good" searches. "How do I get the software for the samsung ml-4500" and "Samsung ml-4500 xp drivers" - I have a Ghostscript driver patch. Does Ghostscript work as a printer driver on XP? "Cycle tracks near sandringham" - there's part of NCN1 alongside the A149, but most of the other cycle routes near Sandringham are along quiet roads (which is fine). "What does wag stand for regarding football?" - Wives And Girlfriends. BTW it's a stupid TLA IMO. "Wretton planning", "Wretton parish council", "business properties for sale in Wretton" and "properties for sale in field lane Wretton" - I've not been to Wretton in some time, let alone mentioned its planning or set up an estate agent there! "How to grow grapevine in a conservatory?" - damned if I know. I would think the temperature change each time you open a door would hurt it too much. "Hanging washing out over night" - it's a bad idea if it's going to freeze. "Why some people take so long to reply to emails" - we're busy trying to thaw the washing out. "Satellite frequency for ulster tv for sky plus box" - 10906MHz Vertical polarisation 22Msym/s, but can you record "other channels" on Sky Plus or should you buy a real DVR? "Where can i find a picture of st james swimming pool in kings lynn?" - try Norlink's Picture Norfolk section. "What happened to opensource.org?" - It was transferred from SPI to OSI. Strangely, the next search phrase listed was "simple example of unethical behaviour"... "What to do about death?" - be very still and start to rot? "bf uk cbhf" - I give up. Did 8 of you headbutt the keyboard? "I hate belkin" - Me too. "Interesting questions to ask someone" - no, not on this site. "Bar" - best idea yet. Cheers!

When looking through my Webalizer stats recently I noticed that *.search.live.com is transferring about four times as much data from my domain than *.google.com. This wouldn't concern me if I saw some people being referred to my site from live.com, however I see almost none, while google.com is responsible for referring about half the traffic to my site!

Then I looked through the aggregate stats for all web sites hosted on my ISP and noticed that live.com has three times the bandwidth use of google while not showing up in referrals.

I did a couple of test searches with live.com and it seems that one reason why I'm not getting hits is because the search engine just isn't much good. The search string "bonnie++" does not return any links to my program on the first page (maybe live.com can't handle a '+' character).

So I'm now wondering whether there is any reason to permit the live.com servers to use my bandwidth. It's costing my ISP money for no apparent good cause.

In the past there was a previous MS search engine that I had to block because it's attacks (which can not be described in any other way) were using half the web bandwidth of the entire ISP). This case is not so obviously an attack and I'm wondering whether I should permit it to continue for a while just in case they end up giving me some useful referrals.

Of course the other possibility is that if we all block their servers then the live.com results will become even more useless than they currently are and they'll give up on the idea.

I look forward to comments on this issue.

About two years ago I bought a new laptop. I wanted a unix without messing around with drivers for graphics and wireless, so I choose a Apple iBook with OS X. I havn’t regretted but the inflexibilities of Apples user interface is a burden. So I’m playing with installing Debian on a Firewire-drive. The installation (etch debian-installer RC2) worked fine until the installation of yaboot (the lilo and grub equivalent on powerpc). Google knew the solution: http://www.boborosso.com/. Problem number two was network: My wireless uses WPA-PSK and I don’t have a free cabled connection. More googling: wpa_supplicant was the solution but it wasn’t on the netinstall cd. Boot into OS X and download wpa_supplicant and some other usefull packages. Problem solved. So now I have a firewire-drive with a pretty basic Debian install with X11 running. But I actually used 2 Apple applications (Safari and iTunes) and 2 other pieces of Apple hardware (iPod and Airport Express). Safari is a minor problem, I just have to convince myself that my banking is just as (un)suportted with Firefox as it is with Safari. More interesting is the iTunes/iPod/Airport Express problems. iTunes is easily replaced by xmms but I really likes playing music through AirTunes and I need to keep my iPod updated. So it will porbally take some nore evenings to get completely rid of OS X. And the I need two more mouse buttons…

* At early morning, I got call from home: “Your pic is in DivyaBhaskar Newspaper!”. I told: “Today is 1st April!”. And I just recalled that I had send some information regarding ‘Gujarati Blog World’ and it might got published. You can see more information on this on My Gujarati Blog. * Again switching to CLI 2 theme. Doesn’t work well but can’t resist myself..